Electronic Theses and Dissertations Theses, Dissertations, and Major Papers
2012
last night's mouth
last night's mouth
Jasmine Elliott University of Windsor
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd
Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Elliott, Jasmine, "last night's mouth" (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 17.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/17
This online database contains the full-text of PhD dissertations and Masters’ theses of University of Windsor students from 1954 forward. These documents are made available for personal study and research purposes only, in accordance with the Canadian Copyright Act and the Creative Commons license—CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works). Under this license, works must always be attributed to the copyright holder (original author), cannot be used for any commercial purposes, and may not be altered. Any other use would require the permission of the copyright holder. Students may inquire about withdrawing their dissertation and/or thesis from this database. For additional inquiries, please contact the repository administrator via email
last night’s mouth
by
Jasmine Elliott
A Creative Writing Project
Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies
through the Department of English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts at the University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
2011
last night’s mouth
by
Jasmine Elliott
APPROVED BY:
P. Fagan
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
S. Holbrook
Department of English
N. Markotic, Advisor
Department of English
D. Jacobs, Chair of Defence
Department of English
Author’s Declaration of Originality
I hereby certify that I am the sole author of this thesis and that no part of this thesis has been published or submitted for publication.
I certify that, to the best of my knowledge, my thesis does not infringe upon anyone’s copyright nor violate any proprietary rights and that any ideas, techniques, quotations, or any other material from the work of other people included in my thesis, published or otherwise, are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices. Furthermore, to the extent that I have included copyrighted material that surpasses the bounds of fair dealing within the meaning of the Canada Copyright Act, I certify that I have obtained a written permission from the copyright owner(s) to include such material(s) in my thesis and have included copies of such copyright clearances to my appendix.
Abstract
Acknowledgements
thanks to:
my parents, who are always supportive, even when they’re not sure what it is I’m doing or why I have to live so far away to do it;
my friends, for grudgingly understanding or flagrantly ignoring my need to work, especially AJ for maple hot chocolate and Magic: the Gathering;
my partner, for being somewhat of an Alex, only real and a lot better;
my advisor, Nicole Markotic, for pushing me kicking and screaming into the concrete, but in a good way;
my professors, especially my panel members; Susan for her encouragement and endurance of love poetry for two straight years, and Patricia for such amazing lectures that I became half a Classics major;
my boss, Marty Gervais, for stories, France, Tim’s, and generally being the best to work for;
my fellow graduate students, especially my Creative Writing peers, for hallway commiserations and suggestions, and especially Brianne O’Grady, Brian Jansen and Kate Hargreaves;
Table of Contents
Author’s Declaration of Originality iii
Abstract iv
Acknowledgements v
you are to me as love is to 1 overdrive 31 compositional difficulties 2 feminine hygiene 32 tracing white lines 3 daylight savings 33 portrait
refrain wait
earworms diminuendo
new words for “over” staccato
90/60 spine
a change of tempo voicemail
hostage negotiations clair de lune
moving parts heart-shaped box
the other side of the world reverb
forgetting Derek lay or lie
a misunderstanding of conics
a methodological analysis of dumpings, or: serial monogamy
feedback 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 25 26 27 30 tums smog
getting a grip string theory
a liberal application da capo al fine blankets & sheets thirty-five years to life transposition
evidence
muscle memory fermata
canon in d learning Alex die hardest head over feet e-cacophony sagittarius worse than Bach
functions of a girlfriend bathroom dialogues arpeggios
resolving the chord
34 35 36 37 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 51 52 53 54 56 57 60 61 62
Artist’s Statement: genre & perspective in last night’s mouth 63
Works Cited 79
you are to me as love is to
She thinks in ratios and sequences. Cats are to night as dogs are to morning. She hangs her shirts
by colour and sleeve length. She can’t resist resolving her songs with the tonic chord of the key
they’re in. Pepperoncini, poblano, jalapeno, cayenne, Thai chilli, scotch bonnet, red savina, ghost
chilli. She builds scales to gauge: the value of a book based on page count and desire to re-read.
The cost-effectiveness of Chinese takeout. The differing moods invoked by the green paint chips
she’s pinned to the bathroom wall. Blue is to calm as alarmed is to yellow. When she says Hello
to him and he sings it back, she can’t resist comparing his voice. Ethan, Derek, James, Michael,
Derek, Caleb. Ethan, Derek, James, Michael, Derek, Caleb. Ethan, Derek, James, Michael,
Derek, Caleb, and now Alex. Frets on a string but does this note form the chord? Is he singing in
tune? Her mother says every song is a love song.
She lays the cards out on the table. Ratios and sequences. She was laid out on a table before, her
arms around a neck. A sideways seven, the rational forgotten. She counts the times she’s wanted
to tell him and loses track. 14, 133, 286, 11. A toppled eight, two zeros holding hands.
compositional you
She used to write music. Melodies murmured hastily under breath, or scribbled across strings and
paper. Sunny days were simple majors, sometimes a key change, an adventurous augmented
sixth. Brass and winds. Break-ups were acoustic guitar and a voice straining against an octave
break. She never sang those to you.
She used to work a score like a formula: input instruments. Time signatures. Keys. Mode. Input
influences: Beethoven. Bach. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Some days an oboe carrying a 6/8 melody
in C and the lilting movement of the sea. Others her cello pulsing like a hammering heart against
a ribcage prison, uneven beats in 5/4 and F minor tripping fingers.
Thursday was a 4/4 andante when she met you. Classic orchestral; violins pined softly in the
underbelly of illuminated clouds, hinting at hidden sun. Wind brushed leaves across
windowpanes like paint, flutes whispering. And she sat on the blanket in the park with friends,
prepared for another failed set-up: a grey-eyed boy with sunburn glowing as brass. A trombone
this time? Euphonium?
You said Hi in a pianissimo but entered a tenor saxophone. You’re in the wrong ensemble, she
wanted to say. You don’t belong here, you’re out of tune.
tracing white lines
I buy you a long-sleeved shirt for your birthday. You’ve been wearing a jacket around the house.
Your mother hasn't caught on, though you've worn it since spring.
I am a murmur, tapping against the frets of your guitar. You’re reading House of Leaves for the
sixth time, eyes tumbling off the edges. You offered to walk me home. An hour ago.
You run absent fingers down your arm, trace the white lines. I wish I could erase them from your
skin. Tattoo freckles into constellations. Alter time like a black hole in sci-fi. Use Men in Black
flash to forget: emptying pockets and empty tomato soup cans under your bed and red residue
congealed on keys and –
Do you want to go get milkshakes?
You turn over on your bed. I don't have any money.
I'll buy you one. I jump out of my chair.
You change into the new shirt and I am a hole in a page. I wish I had ridden my bike past your
house ten years ago. I want you to chase me around the dinner table every night with a lobster.
You look good, I say, fingering the torn pockets of your jeans.
portrait
for Katie West
Sometimes I am a photographer, trying to capture the exact. You. I frame you between hands in
the morning, shift to conserve light from the window that flirts with your face. I wait for the
moment when you just begin to stir, the first time you blink. In that second, I could be anyone to
you. If I could catch that snapshot, I could forget you, too. But I do not have a camera and you
look at me and I aim for you but never simultaneously. Every glance candid.
refrain
with a chorus of it’s a bad idea she remembers: late night fuck-yous into cell phones and dialling
the same number over and over, hanging up just as many times. more. nights when listening to
Gorecki too loudly and fantasies about running to Tuscany weren’t vivid enough and she’d go
looking for love: in all the right places. at all the wrong times. finding someone to want after six
tequila shots and crying into phone numbers written on her arm, wondering if he’d give up on
her if she weren’t giving it up and wanting not to cry at the prospect of giving it up to anyone
else. cycles so vicious they made every circle sharp-edged: and sometimes, when the night’s
more wrong than right she throws his Linkin Park CDs at him.
without hymnal it’s a bad idea echoing around her it’s just his mouth on her neck and her hair
brushed back and the way her shoulders sink and shrink her body into a ball of clay that he
shapes, fingers tracing collarbones unhesitant as if he had solved the hypotenuse of her shape,
collected her flesh from the floor of a lake.
wait
leaky faucet water drips steady, wastefully carries me away from: last time skin kissed and closer
to: swallowing soil thirsty and who remembers your lips curling around Cassie as your thighs
against mine from behind and root legs dig deeper in blankets you left, plant themselves, reach
for water spent: my sunlit decay.
earworms
At this moment she is stuck in another, a cork trapped in a bottle of wine: if pushed too far, likely
to be swallowed.
The night of their first kiss. Really their second kiss: the first real one. (Derek counts the
time they were playing Spin the Bottle with their friends, but she doesn’t.) They are in
her mother’s basement on an overstuffed grey couch. They press together against the chill
of an unseasonably cold spring day. Both of them think just this: just cold.
Takes hours but finally his lips brush hers: a careful non-accident. And a cork pops, and
out pours: years of pizza that he’ll steal the last bite of from her plate, the underwear
she’ll take back out of his backpack, reviews of their dates that he will leave on her
laptop screen. An endless string stretches from their lips, a plucked note inaudibly low.
Cassie is too world-weary at sixteen to believe he could be “the one” and too
immediately in love to tell him he’s not. His mouth could swallow her and does every
time, sometimes in waves of cold ocean water, but more often summer rain that blurs a
kiss into a benediction as the sky falls down around her.
Even gravity changes and her fist balled to knock on his door hesitates, falls, as if learning to
orbit a new planet. It isn’t his lips she remembers when shaking knees turn.
His hair. When he shows up at her door with a grimace and a rose, the slick length
curtaining his face. She invites him in but sits at a distance, his veiled face flinching her
legs. It’s only when the hair is smooth behind shoulders that she can still.
She steps away from the door, a magnet repelled by nickel. Her arms want to find the place
where they fit around him: she needs to orbit. There is only so much mass she can stand until it’s
She stretches around him like a tight-fitting dress, seams about to split. It’s her lips that
he reaches for when she stops shaking.
How seldom she thinks about the miracle of one foot stepping ahead of the other, of this taking
her to or from or away, and how her feet are spreading them apart, how this distance could be
surgery, how she can be a scalpel. She has nightmares about cutting herself open and finding her
lungs have left for lack of speech.
diminuendo
Before their first real kiss: he called early to ask if she had a ride to the party. The next
time, he called because she whined This is an unreasonable hour when he’d woken her
up the last. By the third call, he had no reason at all. The phone ringing, an alarm clock
every weekend, calling her name again and again. Her name.
She staggers down the steps of his apartment building. After one floor: knees shaking so hard she
needs to grab the railing: after the second floor, one stiff arm isn’t enough and Jell-O legs give
up. She descends the third flight of steps sitting down, like she did her grandfather’s steep
stairway when she was five and afraid of falling face-first into the concrete basement. The
stairwell echoes the shifting sound of her clothes against the tiles. In the entrance, she sits facing
the intercom and stares at the name next to 407. His name.
The grey sky waits outside the entrance, clouds spitting at the glass. The grass early spring
yellow, the frayed colour of a musty page. She digs for a book in her bag behind which to bury
her face.
A cork pops.
new words for “over”
To make the perfect chocolate peanut butter milkshake requires all-natural peanut butter. The oil
rises to the top when the sauce is done. I asked you to add butter to the corn and stir to taste. You
are primetime Thursdays at 8 on the CW. Don't call me "Peanut." A smear of ice cream over
your left eyebrow. Painting cat whiskers on your sister's face. You prefer your chili from an
oversized brown mug. I was always the big spoon. Empty cans underneath your bed and the
missing sneaker that gave them away. You said I don't know how to taste the stir. This is the last
time you'll escape the blender. I am the David Letterman of complex beverages. Your ladle drops
in too late. The steam of water mixed with tea tree oil exfoliates. You wanted to name our cat
“Mug.” The pot boiling over. A phone number on my arm, half-erased. Green bananas ruined.
staccato
Some nights she dreams of drowning, but more often than not, he’s the one dead. Car accident or
murder or cancer but no matter the cause, it’s always sudden, one minute hers and the next in the
hospital, goodbyes and flatlines. The Xerox paper white of the empty corridors and sheets, and
blood flashes vivid red like television food colouring and corn syrup.
She used to wake up next to him still sleeping, chest heaving and hair spilt across the pillow, and
the dim moon through the window, and the only red the pallor of his alarm clock’s light tracing
crevices between limbs and sheets. Now, she smothers in-out of panicked breath into pillow: she
has never told him and never will.
90/60
She has avoided calling her mother for the past three days because she does not want to tell her
mother that Derek broke up with her again. She has five missed calls. She knows that her mother
would say, Cassie, he wasn’t ____ enough for you, and right now she does not want to admit to
knowing that, too. And last time when she decided to lie and say she felt sick, she had to put up
with a half-hour lecture about taking her vitamins and eating three times a day and going to the
doctor because it’s possible she might be diabetic or cancerous or dead and she ended up making
an appointment just because her mother kept asking and asking and it turned out she had low
iron and now she has to take vitamins every day.
Instead, on the fourth day she e-mails her mother pretending she has left her phone at a friend’s.
Her mother replies, I hope you’re taking your vitamins.
spine
if she could touch you again she would trace your spine. her arms reach to wrap hands around
shoulderblades and slide between them like hips to feel slow-sloping curve from your neck’s
nape to back’s hollow to slick fingertips with sheen of sweat to lick hands and taste salt to draw
nerves uncoiling from the centre of you to every inch of skin to press places where those threads
lit like flares where your dazzled flesh would flinch. she wants to push bone segments to feel the
concrete of your column to know the marrow. she wants to confirm that your spine feels like his
only that it doesn’t it can’t because there was a time when she took hours to memorize curve,
skin, nerves, bones and in seconds she would remember fine hairs goosebumps under fingers are
not the raised scar between vertebrae and shoulderblades that she can never find when she
reaches past his neck.
if she could touch you again she would trace your spine. and it would feel like yours only but the
reason she knows is because it would be too hard to face you again.
a change of tempo
Every time I walk into your bar, you’re not there. I have been holding this seventh for measures
and you never enter when you’re supposed to, and everyone leads unresolved sometimes but
could you at least be in tune? Only when I’m surrounded by your scent do I feel drunk. Look, it’s
not like I’m the tenor saxophone. I know you think so, but you never keep score and if we hadn’t
been rifling through pages we wouldn’t have made this mess in the first place. And yeah, these
are all dead trees, sheafs and reeds. If I knew how to press air through metal I might play easier
with fewer keys. But I’m more of an oboe. Hard to form your lips around. Maybe if you took
lessons, but listen, it can take years. Sometimes you need to hold down the Eb to tune your
forked F. No, I never joke about fingering. I didn’t go home with him. We danced together but
he was from Wisconsin. Too many syllables and you’ll muck up the meter. I’d prefer to conduct
in a moderato. I play solo so there’s no need to assemble an ensemble, okay? A little
accompaniment, maybe. There’s no need to follow like you’re the next page because it’s obvious
that I’m your cover and what’s inside isn’t printed in ink. You tried a pianissimo, but I heard that
accidental. You have to key your signatures or you’ll ruin the whole concerto. And speaking of
this stage, I wish you’d take the coda. We both hate Bach so it’s not like the tempo would
change. My embouchure is fine as is. It’s you who gets tight-lipped. What, you’re trying to learn
voicemail
One night you and I were at the karaoke bar, you were not. The bedroom rumble that used to
answer my calls pressed into her hair. And to you, I disappeared into the noise of someone’s
off-key voice. One of few times a receiver wasn’t between us.
You moved your hand towards hers, turned your chin towards the collar of her shirt, buying twin
gin-and-sevens at the empty stools while I spun beneath the coloured lights. I used to think you
didn’t like dancing. I used to not mind.
I wanted you because you wanted me. The minute your arm left my shoulders, you slipped. You
weren’t what I’d ordered. I liked the way you melted against my tongue. Cotton candy soft and
neon-sweet.
And when you left, I was a kid who’d dropped an ice cream cone. But I’m not a kid anymore and
I can buy my own. There are thousands of ice cream flavours in the world: chocolate peanut
butter in chocolate-dipped waffle bowls and stracciatella gelato in sugar.
So I’m not leaving my new number. And you should remember my name.
hostage negotiations
Tucked away in the bottom drawer of my nightstand: your blue bunny. You’ve had it since the
day you were born. Your mother told you when you were seventeen that your parents replaced it
once with the exact same one you lost at the age of three. When you were fifteen it lost the carrot
it holds between its tiny paws so you bought a new bunny and cut out its carrot and sewed it into
your bunny’s grip and gave the vegetable-free new one to your sister. You kept yours next to you
on your pillow until you were twenty.
We lie on your bed. You have broken every promise you ever made so you reach across
your pillow, pick up this bunny, say to me This is a hostage. You press it into my hands. I
can never abandon you. I will always come back for this.
You don’t. And the day I am in your apartment while you’re out, I’m leaving my keys and your
China Mieville books and your black and grey hooded sweaters in a box. I reach into my bag to
stuff the bunny inside, but in the end hands hesitate and collect the ransom unpaid. Keep it in my
nightstand drawer I can’t open, buried under your pictures of the ocean, the new carrot snagged
between the left paw and the sprung underwire of my old green bra.
clair de lune
The oldest restaurant in Paris. I have run so many time zones away from that for weeks I’ve slept
through kettle corn and Alien, late nights in the backyard drinking spiked root beer in our tent
and squeezing into a single sleeping bag. This is the last night: the yellow-gold glow of the
overhead lights spilling out onto a balcony where iron chairs like trellises sit around a table for
two, looking out over the Latin Quarter at dusk. I scrape Brie onto oblong bread. Next will be the
foie gras, seared precisely to preserve the pink in the centre, and the crème brûlée, burnt sugar
crisp and caramel brown on the surface. I’m eating alone and the fluffy whites of eggs sit heavy
in my stomach, already overwhelmed by the pain au chocolat at lunch. I am bidding farewell to
France by consuming enough to spend an ocean-crossing digesting. There is an empty vase in the
centre of the table that holds a single rose. How romantic, I think, to be sitting here one breezy
summer evening like this, and I picture myself in my black-and-white polka dot dress sharing
this table and drinking this glass of wine, only that you aren’t the one across from me. And it’s
now that I begin to understand you never will be.
moving parts
I dream that you rip me apart and I don’t mean with words. Bound against your headboard, you
tear away clothes like damp paper, pull hair, wrench my neck. Brown strands parting scalp and
marking your pillows. And you bend to mark me, mouth biting sucking hard between shoulder
and neck, hips grinding into mine. Our gears shift and you move me into sixth. The acceleration
screeching. But when you engine growl my name there’s a click and your breath hitch changes
everything. I’m no longer dreaming and I wake to my mouth mangling my name like a new word
heart-shaped box
Every day without you a revolver with one round loaded. To remember pulls the trigger and I
wait for the spinning barrel. I stop listening to the Nickelback you used to put on while we made
out (no big loss). I watch Fight Club and Die Hard with someone else and wait for him to laugh
or cheer, overwrite you. I skip hot peppers on pizza and never get my milkshakes from The
Creamy Cow. I never watch Supernatural curled up on my bed and obviously never while eating
strawberries. I buy new underwear sets, none of them blue or green.
There are only so many chambers to spin and eventually the bullet hits. When it does I’m
standing outside with you in the pouring rain, your hands buried in my wet-slick hair and my
hands digging into wet-hard denim at your hips; knowing we will peel off those clothes, will
make love on your mattress, knowing we will step into the shower, that you will bury your hands
in my steam-hot hair, that you will bury yourself in me again and again and again and again,
knowing you will be buried.
The more I forget you the more I’m afraid there will be a hole in me, inexplicable. The more I
forget the more I’m afraid the gun will go off and I’ll know why. You always said you’d rather
burn out than fade away and Neil Young aside I could never decide if I’d rather face both barrels
or die of old age.
the other side of the world
A postcard from you. A picture of orca whales in Haro Strait. Two years since the last. You’re
sleeping on your brother’s couch in Victoria. I don’t know how you got my new address.
You saw the ocean and thought of the necklace you gave me in Digby, soaked in the Atlantic for
luck. The opal rings we bought on the Princess of Acadia, when our tickets gave us the same last
name. Mine. The day I slipped on kelp by the shore and washed barnacle-scraped shins in
stinging salt water.
Somewhere on that other side of the world, we might still be inseparable, you write. Sitting on a
dock, watching seal-watching ships, eating eggplant pizza picnics in the park and counting
lighthouses.
I find those pictures in a drawer. I put them in an envelope.
reverb
It is the cold that keeps you up, lately. You rest the neck of the guitar against the pillows and it
creates a body’s silhouette on the far side of the bed. You roll over to the tuning pegs; it’s not the
shape you crave, but the warmth. The soft give of flesh between hip and rib where you would
sling a restless leg in the middle of the night. Your thighs squeeze tense without hot skin slick
between, limbs seeking something to surround. The instrument will not tug on sheets and
blankets. When you run sleepless fingers over the fretboard it rings but the voice is metal thin,
dispersing. The room quiet and the blue of the alarm clock’s time too bright. Your comforter
forgetting Derek
The way your nostrils flare in your sleep.
Chess. Your fingers lingering on rooks and bishops, teaching me Intermezzo and Windmill and
Battery, my moves slow and awkward with strategy. Your genuine surprise the few times I beat
you.
Cases of empties stacked in the corner of your room.
The scars on my arm from the time we were playfighting at the park and you pulled me down to
you while I was climbing a tree and the bark left scrapes I can still barely see.
Washing your dishes at five in the morning because we’d fought and you fell asleep but I
couldn’t and I needed to do something and the running water made me feel like you wouldn’t
hear me crying though of course you didn’t hear anything.
Going over to check that you were wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day because of your
blue-green colourblindness. Taking off your navy blue shirt.
Your friend at the photography show who said you should keep me because of the marks I’d left
on your neck.
Wiping off your collar when you puked up onion rings on your 21st birthday.
The way you used to take my pizza and eat the last bite just so that I’d throw the box at your
head.
The deliberately confusing scarf I made you with greens and blues and teals and turquoises
The scars on your arms. You used to joke about them, sometimes. They were not like mine.
When we were trying to be friends and I dyed your hair, and you took off your shirt and bent
your head over the bathtub and I combed the shower nozzle over your head and the water beaded
on your bare back and then it didn’t seem very much like we were trying to be friends.
The blue bunny’s replacement carrot.
The first time I went to your house when you still lived with your mother and I saw your
photographs on the wall and you explained depth of field and I said, Oh, and then I said, Maybe
you could take me shooting and teach me, and you squeezed my hand.
Your deliberately mismatched black and white socks.
The pictures of me that you kept in albums that I only ever found out about when your sister took
them out.
Teal paint because your favourite colours were always the ones you could claim were either and
never be exactly wrong.
Watching you play Halo online in the bedroom while I pet the cat. Letting the cat sit on your
controller hand so that you’d mess up.
The knives I dug out of your pockets and hid behind the trash bin under the sink.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This is not about you. I don’t know if you’ve even seen it, but you
bear a striking resemblance to Michael Pitt when you orgasm.
Your favourite Rock Band songs. My roommate can’t play Expert drums the way you did and the
The hole you punched in the wall when you found out your father was back in rehab.
The green scarf you bought me for Christmas that actually matched my jacket.
The mornings you came home from nightshift and brought me a tealberry muffin and fed it to me
lay or lie
Some nights I don’t think about you at all. I lose myself in Caleb and forget the way all flesh
used to feel like your echo. His is loud singing, an open string ringing, plucked in nimble
fingertips. Lips sleepwalk along curves and edges. Hips drive deep towards hollows vacated, a
thumping rhythm reverberating in caverns of mouth.
Sometimes I lie in bed smelling of sweat and Stetson, wrapped naked in arms and running
fingers along the ridges of spine. Learning bones, muscles – reaching for that spot at the edge of
your right shoulderblade where a mole dangled like a flap of skin you’d rip off in the shower.
Some nights I don’t think about you at all. I don’t know why I reached for missing skin and
post-coital bliss becomes:
how long can I sit in the bathroom
how long can I swallow
can I stop shaking
can I stop
can I
I lie in bed smelling him. Every part that’s not yours, that never will be again. It’s dark and hot
and you’re gone. But the morning comes in warm sheets, limbs firm around me, a sure kiss and
Did you sleep all right? I won’t think about my stiff neck when we woke up inches apart on your
floor, the draft from your window, the way your hands shook when you boarded the bus, guitar
a misunderstanding of conics
Freckles form rays in opposite directions down my legs, infinity past kneecaps. Geometry
hook-and-eye fits. Algebra, you get caught at the clasp. Physics: let ‘er rip. After this, let’s get milk,
love, bread, dildos, eggs, bananas. Let’s get it ontologically, let’s loll on onomatopoeia: oh-oh
yes creak-bang yes and when you come, I shutter with release, 0.3” speed graining with haze of
drink: y = margaritas flung back + one good measure shot and your arm estimating my waist the
whole stumble to bed. Make fuck to mean: or median, mode. I fashion the blankets around your
shoulders, a parabola shifting on a two-dimensional plane. I am not a sum sleeping: I wait for
a methodological analysis of dumpings, or: serial monogamy
1. In person. Ethan, during her lunch period. She isn’t sure if she can call this method
preferable or that much more personal. Afterwards she had to return to class and write a
geometry exam and she was never very good at shapes, a fact later exploited by Alex the
first time she tried to play Tetris against him.
2. Over the phone. Derek, the first time. This method suffers from the fact that she hasn’t
seen the person who dumped her, so it takes until the next time she does, with another
girl and dressed in that shirt she bought him last Christmas and looking good in it because
of her impeccable taste, that it really sinks in that the owner of said phone voice does not
give a shit about her fashion sense. Also there’s the embarrassing bit wherein said
vocalist will hear when she starts to cry and/or cover the mouthpiece.
3. Over MSN. James. Less embarrassment here with the whole crying issue but why not just
call? The MSN break-up implies that the other party might be also chatting with other
people and liking Facebook statuses and reading articles on Cracked and listening to
Green Day and hooking up with someone on webcam and in the end the embarrassment
might be worth knowing that the person cares at least enough to give the break-up his
undivided attention.
4. Over e-mail. Michael. It’s hard to talk about platform sandal disasters in an e-mail. Or
rather, one person can say everything about the unwanted height of shoes and then be
done and not have to ever read the reply1. Also she thinks e-mails can be chicken-shit
missives, which is of course why when she’s drunk or lonely she sends a lot of them to
Derek’s old e-mail address, which to the best of her knowledge he never checks.
5. Changed Facebook status. The third time, Derek disconnected his phone and quit his job
and got evicted and a couple of weeks later she found out he was single. Then in a
relationship. With someone she’d never heard of. Caleb spat out his chicken fried rice
laughing when she showed him but at the time she wrote a lot of very, very bad songs.
Words cannot express
how eager I long
to not speak to you again;
I'd mount a chainsaw if it could cut you away
from me.
You wash the blood off your hands.
And I don't remind you to remember I exist.
Every solution doesn’t equate, I forget to calculate
the way you always change your mind.
Here's my prediction:
you've got a predilection
for fucking things up.
I hope you've been watching stars align
‘cause I was destined to dispose of you.
My skin innocent without your imprint.
I'm not confessing to living in your sin.
Every equation ends up nameless without the madness
that is wanting you.
Words cannot express
how eager I long
to not speak to you
6. In a text message. This one was Caleb, and after all that he’d mocked the Facebook
approach. His method might seem comparable to the MSN-dump but actually it’s worse
because texting takes longer than typing so it takes forever to convey that he’s a
fuckwaddling douchecanoe that didn’t even have the decency to call even though he’s
obviously on the phone and with a shitty plan every text costs fifteen cents plus if it had
been on MSN, at least she could’ve settled in at home, whereas during the dump via text
message one could be anywhere, up to and including at her best friend’s wedding that he
couldn’t make it to right after she had watched the happy couple cut the cake. And that’s
why she’s okay with being friends with James but for all intents has changed
feedback
It is the heat that keeps you up, lately. The slick, sticky stretch of skin that presses you into the
sheets, a silhouette sheen left when you step out of the room, clammy feet peeling from
hardwood floor. Cold showers in the middle of the night ease the sweat but remembered scent of
him clings like a wet shirt to rigid bones. Those bones knew sleep: you curled cheek into flesh
below shoulder, listened to heart slow, the gentle groan of sleep crossing lips. But the smell
swells the ache between stiff hips, your nose buried in skin and sweat, the sweet mixture of stink
and sex and Speed Stick. You shiver, limbs longing, unsure whether to want or run. It is the heat
overdrive
Sex is another way to say God. On the first day, I came with condoms and change. The animal is
mineral and the mineral is pressed into coin. I am falling out of sidewalks into your pocket.
Please roll me amongst myself. I am burning up revved up in your head. This part is a sketch of
your ingrown toenail. The pencil becomes that twist in your brow when you’re almost almost.
Break both my arms and sign the casts. I voted for the other guy but I’ll respect your foreign
feminine hygiene
Her mother says she goes through boys like tampons, a comparison she admits might be apt if
she actually used tampons, but something about jamming phallic white wads through a cardboard
tube up there has never sat right with her. Nor could she ever sit right with one of them in. And
she wishes her mother would say at the beginnings of relationships rather than at the end that she
knew they would rip apart like wet cotton, though she obviously wouldn’t have listened. But it
would be decent of her mother to try, especially if she’s going to criticize the choice of product
afterwards. Her mother never did recommend a brand, but only kept Super Plus in the cabinet,
which may be why her first tampon experience ended in more bleeding than when it began. She
wishes boyfriends would be as simple to dispose of, not that she would ever try to flush one, but
at least when you throw out your feminine hygiene products in those dainty paper bags in
bathrooms they never make awkward phone calls to demand their Philip K. Dick back. Then
again, she’s always wondered about the etiquette of disposing uterine lining in a bachelor’s
apartment, and once wrapped up her pad in toilet paper and hid it in her purse to take home and
throw out the next morning, which made her wallet smell like rotting meat but Michael had
never had a sister, so she figures it was the best decision even though she uses the memory to
daylight savings
your hands in my hair and my head in your lap and I want to roll over and ask you what you
meant when you said you didn't think of me that way anymore. because I know there are ways
you think of me. I watch you watching me, tunnel vision through a crowd, flattened every time I
smile at you. and I watch you watching someone else and wonder: would you still if I smiled at
you now? and maybe – but I’m scared of pinning you down, or of wanting it the other way
around. peeling time away between us like your shirt from summer skin and watching and
tums
she drinks him in like a glass of chocolate milk for the lactose intolerant: taking slow sips from
the brim, delaying deep ache in her abdomen that she knows will come. she’s mapped this path
and she knows she doesn’t need a second trip, a rehash of the addiction of jaw, throat,
collarbones. air hisses through her teeth and the mayfly in her stomach shudders when he moves
and there’s half a smile, the corner of an eye. he’s talking to her roommate and she can’t decide
how much time she has until she’ll notice that if he were liquid, she would have already
swallowed too fast and choked mid-gulp.
smog
We’re alone in your apartment and I snap like the overstretched elastics you pull out of my
drooping ponytails to fling across your room. I gather your hair in a hand and crush your mouth
with mine, part your lips with my insistent tongue. Your hands yank at my loose strands and the
kisses we share smell of the river in spring: polluted rot of failed industry. I’m tumbled and
breathless in your bed, all business bankrupt, inhaling cancer against your suckled neck. I never
getting a grip
Derek’s hands are small for a man’s, not much larger than hers. He tells her there’s a psychology
to hand-holding, the gaps between fingers, the way knuckles curl, whether palms are side by side
or one hand closes over the other – she loses track of words but he suddenly drops sentences
when he squeezes through the latticework between them, grinning lopsided at the way they fit
slick together like wet Spandex. He always did cling to her skin.
Alex’s hands are disproportionately large for his body. She doesn’t tell him about Derek’s for
fear he’ll be insecure about the gaps. Instead she focuses on the way his long fingers tangle in
her longer hair, trying not to lose track of words when she puts him on like her favourite Modest
Mouse 2004 tour shirt, overworn and soft against her skin. When she looks in the mirror she
string theory
You have so many knots. Alex smiles. Are you always a sailor?
Lately, she exhales, and as he’s working out kinks she thinks about the knots and nots thus far
between them, nights dancing at the Loop and oral sex and midnight I miss you texts she wants
and has yet to get, as she tangles her feet in the sheets of his unmade bed.
He doesn’t talk, just presses harder into her back she arches and leans into unravelling knots.
Derek wanted to tie his with her and she can feel the tension under Alex’s hands, a lump
threaded into muscle where calloused fingers used to grasp. Alex has never played a guitar. His
fingertips are Vaseline smooth.
Maybe you should lie down, he suggests, and she swings her legs around and plants flat on her
chin, mouth smothered in pillows.
He edges up the hem of her shirt as his hands work the small of her back. She was so tightly
wound that now with knots undone she’s nodding off and it takes until the hooks of her bra to
realize this might be a little bit naughty. Suddenly she’s awake and wanting and every not of
their turning hips his lips trailing down missed-missed calls kinks into his hands, his work
ravelling.
Hands stop and slide back down, pulling her shirt into place. Her sigh evaporates into the
pillowcase and she rolls over between his legs.
I gave you time, I made you rhyme
I wrote a song to fill the silence
because you're gone, I play it on and on
to the phone that won't ring
I sing:
I spend these nights alone listening to my dial tone, baby.
I spend these nights alone listening to my dial tone.
So give me a reason to stay, to not just walk away
'cause at the end of the day, walking is my groove.
So give me a reason to stay, to not just walk away
'cause at the end of the day, I keep hitting the snooze.
In my empty bed, I rest my head
trembling hands remembering edges of your body.
I erase your number with a shudder. My heart is racing,
I can’t sleep and
I spend these nights alone listening to my dial tone, baby.
I spend these nights alone listening to my dial tone.
So give me a reason to stay, to not just walk away
'cause at the end of the day, I'm going to have to choose.
So give me a reason to stay, to not just walk away
'cause at the end of the day, I've got nothing to lose
a liberal application
You are a summer fling or a rock thrown through September’s window. How was I to know we
would start with schnapps? I slip sidelong from applicable alliterations in favour of spreading
shivers across your body like whipped cream and you track the cursor across my screen, play coy
da capo al fine
Old sheets bundled in the pine chest at the foot of the bed. You eat pretzels one side at a time,
licking off the salt first. Sweat sponged. Last night’s mouth inside my thigh and the soreness of
bite. Searching the department store aisles for lavender 300 thread count to match. The Gillette
Fusion left in the shower. How your morning hair parts on the right. Three Coors Light in the
fridge unopened. Vomiting in your bathroom and the dress sent back dry-cleaned. A can of
instant coffee too high on the shelf. Your collection of ties aligned by colour, width, pattern on
the back of the bedroom door. Mismatched socks mixed into my laundry. The bottle of Evian on
blankets & sheets
She makes a list for him, all the beds she’s been through:
1. Derek’s twin, at his mother’s. The first time he lifted her shirt and she flushed red, he
dropped the hem when he realized Ethan hadn’t. Their first was under blankets no clothes
missionary but the lights were on and she’s been able to recreate the squinted lines of his
eyelids on the edges of her sheet music since.
2. Her own. James still lived with his parents and wasn’t allowed alone with girls in his
room. He drooled into her pillow in his sleep.
3. Michael’s, always neatly made and seeming such a shame to waste. They never got under
the sheets. He always got up immediately to shower as she fell asleep, waking up halfway
through the night uncovered and shivering.
4. Derek’s mattress on a floor in his near-bare room. No bedpost to notch but they found
something to mark in every corner of his apartment: the living room coffee table, his
roommate’s recliner, the kitchen counter. But his half-bed was where they slept, and the
red of his alarm clock made his leg slung over hers an orange haze.
5. Caleb’s sunken double where he curled around her like a cat with a pouch of catnip.
Syllables claw like anxious cats at her throat. On some notiversaries all she can do is yowl
names, and he’ll never hear the way they screamed or sighed or whispered hers, fucking her or
wanting to or whatever it is that came after. Her name elongates on his tongue, stretching hours
into days and months, until she gives up giving up. But some nights, when he enters and she
forgets his name, she wonders if these sheets will be another statistic:
6. Alex’s.
thirty-five years to life
Let's take this one sentence at a time.
I sentence you to a thousand lines that rhyme, internal or ex, and baby I don't care which way
you lay me down as long as you don't mistake it for lying. Trying syntax scrambled to
approximate I am hands on hips. If at first you don't succeed, try a whip. Stripping away adverbs
and adjectives so that you verb and take me direct as an objection. A comparison is a simile is a
metaphor is summer hay hair raised on the back on my neck. I won’t object to hands behind my
back if the rope holds fast and you hurry. Slip in to infinitively split me. Paragraphs might pace
themselves better or we might
break
transposition
First love. The words roll over her tongue like peanut oil. Ethan. The first boy who kissed her.
The first boy who dumped her. She had no choice, gripped in his arms. After they broke up, she
realized that she couldn’t love someone who called her a slut for her pink lipstick or shirts cut
dipping towards the suggestion of her breasts. He was not the buried city; his hands secure
around her neck and the backs of her knees to be catalogued for further archaeology.
First love. The last time she tasted Derek he was tequila and the cigarettes he had promised he’d
quit. In his mouth she remembers strawberries dipped in lemon meringue or the salt water of the
Atlantic or the sharp mint that meant he’d been smoking but cared enough to want her not to
know. She’s tasted him for the first time over and over again, leaving and coming back to the
same mouth. But faulty memory has rearranged the smoke and lime and there is too much
confusion in the dating to decide which comes first.
First love. In every movie a girl is always ditching some guy at the altar to get back together with
her old flame, but Cassie wishes hers would burn. Every time she falls in love he’s a wrong turn.
What does it mean if she’s committed to the wrong exit, again and again? The signs when she
returns to the highway are smeared in mud and she’s afraid she’s already made too many stops.
What is there to give if she’s already given it up? There are nights in bed with Alex when she
can’t help but wonder: what does he taste like? What does it mean that she can’t remember? She
kisses him to test but only catches lingering Aquafresh. I want to fossilize you. I want you to have
been before. She says she wishes she’d met him when she was sixteen, but he just snorts, You
evidence
Your cat climbs up on the rim of the bathtub. Pencil me in Wednesday, shade the skin between
my breasts. Your hair a bat in the morning. I leave a note on the fridge to explain the missing
clementines. Soaping myself where your hands should be. You put your glasses on the ledge of
the window behind the bed, but wake up and forget. I leaf through sketches of eyes, none of
them mine. The way you tilt your head and drink the last sip from the right. You make fun of my
bubblemint gum, the percussion of my mouth. I flick water at her whiskers and she bats at
fingers. Apples in the crisper wasted. I check for my name on your calendar. Clipping toenails to
the beat of the popping chew. Jeans still belted on the floor. Milkshakes available upon request.
muscle memory
She never practices when he comes over. When her roommate lets him in, he’ll hear the muffled
notes of Bach Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor through her door but when he opens it unannounced
her bow stops on the string, so quickly he can hear the squeak of fresh rosin.
Why won’t you play in front of me?You play concerts all the time.
With more people it’s easier. When it’s just you, I’m afraid you’ll think I’m a robot freak.
Still he inhales sharp at the way the wide body of the cello seems to strain her parted legs, how at
any moment she might disappear into it when she’s on the stage, when small hands stretch across
fingerboard with awkward grace, contorted so that he can see every bone and tendon yearning
for the next note, yet so rehearsed that her eyes close, and her arm shifts up and down the long
wooden neck of the instrument that hums between her legs. Attending her concerts leaves him
fermata
I want to pause before you,
but around you my sentences run on and on in a marathon about the red leggings I bought at the
mall last Saturday or the purple tie I saw that you’d like and maybe we should go to see the latest
Bruce Willis before it leaves theatres but I hate the Cineplex because the popcorn always makes
me sick and getting frozen yogurt just isn’t the same and you name the place for dinner I’d love
to do Chinese again but the fried rice isn’t making me any thinner and maybe it’s better if we
stay in and cook because I have everything we need to make pad Thai in the wok and we haven’t
eaten Thai together since that time you played me the soundtrack from Tron.
canon in d
When I was fourteen, she says, facing away from him on the bed.
I still don’t understand why you never told me. He reaches out for her hip.
Four out of five women are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. Her legs curl up towards her
body, rumpling the sheets. Telling you, I become another statistic.
He wraps a hand around her waist. She doesn’t move. He rubs her stomach over her shirt. You
could never be a – statistic.
She muffles herself in a pillow. It was a long time ago.
Fucking bastard, he says. She folds her hand over his.
He was the photographer at my prom, she says. He had these wide blue eyes. I felt like I could
see them through that lens. He was always aiming it at me.
He squeezes her hand. That’s horrible.
I didn’t tell my date, she continues, her voice tight. There are pictures of us – under the arch.
They look normal. But I just – every time I picked up a Coke that night, I could smell his scotch.
He squeezes her hand again, doesn’t relinquish the pressure.
I’m so sorry, Cassie, he says.
learning Alex
Your taste in cheese. Smoked Gouda, Camembert, Asiago, Jalapeno Havarti, Swiss. A night with
you and wine and bagel crisps is enough to get me through an eight-page essay or three hours of
Suite No. 3 in C major.
You think I’m tuning you out but when you babble about a comic book or a line of toys or a
video game I lose my place in what you’re saying because your geekiness turns me on, so that
blank smile on my face has nothing to do with putting up with you, and everything to do with
wanting to put out.
You are easy to write songs about.
Am I in key?
Am I in tune, or a similar harmony? You see,
I have been speechless
because of you
our silence in unison.
You have given me
no reason to speak
so I quit.
Words have fallen short of
woefully inadequate and you
seem to think it was
something I said.
This is another utterance
of your name: oh, Alex,
this is another promise
Swimming. The sand on the beach gleaming white and you thought the heat would make the lake
lukewarm but it was snow-cone cold, and when you got thigh deep I waded out in front of you
and dove in. And when you finally walked in, I threw my hands around your neck and my legs
around your waist and you tangled your hands in the seaweed of my hair and we kissed as if no
one else was there, though of course Wasaga is a public beach and you’ve never said whether or
not that’s a fetish of yours.
You are an adorable drunk. But I don’t fancy trying to hold your hair back if you throw up
because it’s not long enough to clasp in a ponytail nor short enough to stay out of the way. Try
not to throw up.
Your soda trivia knowledge. TAB was the original Diet Coke. Crystal Pepsi flopped worse than
Pepsi Blue. Mountain Dew White Out became available in Slurpee form in January 2011.
You are an expert at Tetris. You’ve even gotten the alternate ending. Not exactly a thing I like
about you because you play when you’re stressed: that you’re good must indicate a lot of
difficulties, which makes me want to give you hugs and cookies and, yeah, orgasms, so Tetris
tangentially relates to the fact that I obviously care. See?
My mother likes you. My mother doesn’t like anyone with a penis. But she likes you. Even after
I told her we were dating she didn’t immediately demand to know how often you wash your
underwear.
You are a guy who keeps swirly multi-coloured straws in his cutlery drawer.
Derek used to say, Palms should press together without any strain on the joints of the fingers. I
forget what else. But your palms touch mine when we hold hands.
Your hammering heart, because I feel it like a bass thump trapped against the speaker in a club
Your leather jacket that your father gave you and that you claim would be the one thing you’d
save from a burning building and that you Scotch-tape Remembrance Day poppies to, avoiding
holes, and the three times you brought it to the shoe repair store to patch torn elbows.
The way you compose yourself at the beginning of a story. You say “Okay, so,” and breathe in
and steel your head with your brow tilted forward like a pickerel about to snatch the bait and then
your hands come up and spread as if to approximate the size of a fish “this big” though you’ve
never gone fishing but when you’re telling a story, I miss stuffing breadcrumbs in the minnow
traps.
When you sigh Katherine quiet with eyes averted, remembering that Valentine’s Day, I want you
to be married and deliriously happy in a Walkerville house with a Blackberry and children and
wide bay windows. Not even with me. Which is not a reason I like you.
You like your steak rare. Honestly, I’m not sure how we’d ever work out if you didn’t. My
mother is always suspicious of vegetarians.
Your kid-in-a-candy-store attitude towards socks. Whenever we pass a rack in a department store
carrying anything other than black or white or grey you need five pairs, especially if there are red
or purple stripes or polka dots on them.
You read a bit slower than me so that when we’re looking at something on Cracked, I can wait
die hardest
Her top action movies include Independence Day, Die Hard, Demolition Man, Braveheart,
everything before CGI took over fight sequences but after wires and pyrotechnics. She makes big
bowls of popcorn in an old pot with the bottom scratched and singed, melts butter from chunks in
the fridge. Her favourites are the wisecracking heroes in tight shirts who save their wives,
daughters, and on-off love interests from aliens and terrorists and boredom. She points out their
gun-toting, sword-slinging resolve, and she rolls her eyes when he won’t choose the night’s
restaurant even though she has the chicken chow mein picked out, until it almost seems like she
might leave him any day for Bruce Willis or a convincing lookalike. But then, every once upon a
dreary Sunday when he holes up in bed sickly and world-weary, she shows up with a tray of
spicy tomato soup and extra crackers and so that he’ll know why she wants him to watch with
head over feet
Cassie’s favourite of her own features is her feet, which is ironic since they’re technically
deformed: her arches are too high and she’s supposed to wear orthopaedic shoes, but when she
was diagnosed at fourteen her mother said those were too expensive so instead she has gel
insoles, which Cassie can’t afford to replace with OSAP, and it’s inconvenient when she flies to
performances in the U.S. because the TSA thinks they’re bombs so she has to pay to check her
luggage or buy new ones when she gets where she’s going. Also she has a hard time wearing
heels so most of the time and especially when she goes out where other girls are dressed up she
looks shorter than she actually is, which is already short enough. Each of her boyfriends has
declared her height cute without fail – Derek declared her “fun size” – but Alex also never fails
to make fun of her when she needs a step stool to get Nesquik down from the top shelf or to
stand on her tiptoes to kiss him. Cassie’s toes make up for the thinness of her soles because they
splay out wide and she can’t wear shoes that are slim or pointy because she’ll get blisters, and
since most women’s shoes in a size 6 have narrow toes and heels, shoe-shopping is a special
form of torture.
But Cassie’s favourite feature is her feet. Her awkwardly-splayed toes are long like fingers, and
she can pick up her shirts off the floor with them. Her feet appear lengthy because they’re so
slender. The curve from pad to heel like an hourglass. When she curls her toes she can see all the
bones moving, and she likes the bony bump of her ankle, like a hip. To enhance the sexiness, she
shaves the hairs that grow on the knuckle of her big toe and paints her toenails flashy fuchsia and
blueberry although she gets cold easily and almost always wears socks.
One day, rationalizing her preference and wiggling her toes at Alex, he says, This explains a lot
e-cacophony
She says, I suck at chess. I have no idea how to think ahead, but it's inaccurate: she has no use
for boards and pieces but with hearts in hand she always has trump, her next conquest a trick
about to be won. She catches red hands clicking for relationship statuses and checking interests,
wall-posting conversation starters: Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ong Bak. Contact. And sometimes
Freud slips and she trips conversation with her boyfriend’s love of orange Crush, his opinion on
The White Stripes break-up, unsure if she’s reminding them or herself of the friendzone, that it’s
just talk. After all, she's usually the one dumped so being first to move on is justified, is justice,
is Justin single? No matter how many times she closes the browser window she can't imagine
Alex different, a variable fixed to hers as equations change: his name under her profile picture as
the arithmetic shifts, in a relationship to engaged to married. But she ignores inbox messages,
sagittarius
She gets an e-mail from Derek on her birthday.
from Derek <[email protected]>
To Cassie <[email protected]>
Date 27 November 2009 20:26
mailed-by hotmail.com
Signed by gmail.com
27/11/2009
I'm so sorry.
Love always.
She leaves her own party in her own house, her roommate distracted by the attempt to tongue a
Jell-O shot out of a stubborn plastic cup and her best friend inebriated, babbling into Andrea’s
hair, and a group of people crowd around Antoine Dodson yet again as she slips out of the living
room. Alex finds her an hour later in the downstairs bathroom, curled up across from the bathtub
playing Final Fantasy I on her iPhone.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, he says, but it’s your birthday. There’s even a party.
They only came for the black forest cake, she mumbles.
The right side of his mouth quirks. What are you doing down here, hon?
She delays him for the space of an enormous sigh, amplified by the acoustics of the bathroom
What Cassie loves about Alex can be summed up in the fact that he grimaces at the name then
sinks down across from her against the bathtub. He never sits on the floor unless it’s in front of
her. What Cassie hates about Alex can be summed up in the fact that he knows how to make her
talk.
He said he was sorry, she says. Her voice dies before the shower can catch its echo.
Alex pulls her head towards his shoulder.
I’m sorry, she tells his neck.
worse than Bach
He tells his friends the way I snore is cute. He throws away pop cans. He takes so long to read
menus that the waitress always has to come back twice. He owns one polo shirt in black, red, and
forest green. He swallows whole mouthfuls of M&Ms. He clips his toenails over the coffee table.
He never ties his shoes. He wears underwear with Santas on them. Year-round. He prefers his
steak well done. He peruses channels with the attention span of a goldfish. He buys new glasses
and gets the exact same frames. He slathers mayonnaise on every sandwich. He insists his
favourite colour is black. He takes five minutes to gel his hair. He always pronounces espresso
functions of a girlfriend
To remember to kiss you goodbye.
To buy gifts you want, regardless of expense (the time we were in the music store, and you tried
out that Stratocaster and you were paycheque-to-paycheque-broke and we both knew that if you
left it to the next, you’d come back and it’d be gone and they wouldn’t put it on hold).
Gifts you want. Your best friend once had a girlfriend buy him a set of wrenches for
Christmas. He has never fixed anything in his life. They broke up before the New Year.
He still has the wrenches.
To do the laundry, but not always, and not if you’re going to take it for granted and start
expecting it all the time like you’re a kid.1
To check your pockets for knives.2
To make jokes at your expense, but in an encouraging way.
Encouragement is key. Your best friend jokes about your ignorance of all sports, your
long hair, your tight shirts, and the probable cumulative effect of these things on your
sexual orientation. Not incredibly helpful before a job interview or high school reunion,
whereas my suggestion that your face might look better without the imitation of Sidney
Crosby’s playoff beard might have been confusing but proved ultimately helpful in
getting the network administrator job.
1
And I swear to God if you keep taking off your socks on the couch and leaving them on the living room floor –
2
To make you dinner sometimes, but only if you’ll also
a) make me Thai Shrimp Curry with steamed rice
b) buy shrimp, coconut milk, red curry paste, lemon grass, fish sauce, brown sugar,
scallions, water chestnut, crimini mushrooms, basil, mint, lime, jasmine rice
c) do the dishes afterwards
d) all of the above.
To feed Elektra while you’re out of town.3
To throw impromptu early morning dance parties in your bedroom, so that when you step out of
the shower hating Wednesdays unable to find your belt, you find yourself instead belting Queen
in your underpants.
To defend your sexual honour (not by talking about your sex life, but by smiling in a certain coy
way when your friends joke about it. The smile has to be perfectly timed and sly, or else the
amusement will be interpreted as a lack of satisfaction. Providing details re: bondage, backwards
cowgirl or blowing your morning wood, however, is trying too hard and will likely result in
nitpicking of said acts, as your ex Katherine proved).
To at least attempt to listen to the endless tirades of information about your obsessions, even if
those unlikely fixations include:
a) Amon Amarth
b) Daredevil comics4
c) re-re-watching the 1922 Nosferatu
d) no-scope sniping in Halo online
e) 4chan /b threads
f) all of the above.
3 The cat likes me better, anyway.
To remember your favourite cereal, so that when I go to the store to get bread and eggs and
you’ve completely forgotten you needed Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I’ll know to get it.
To be insecure and say I feel fat sometimes, so that you can be gallant and tell me I’m beautiful
and sexy, especially in that dress.
Sometimes is pivotal here. If I start to do this all the time, the words will bloat my face
and I would look a little fat, then (and become as annoying as Katherine).
To clean Elektra’s litter box (really, she’s more my cat than yours. Elektra rubs against my legs
whenever she comes in the door and meows and jumps up on my lap and will even stand on her
hind legs for treats. The cat will not do any of these things for you).
To impress your mother by making homemade lasagne whenever she comes over.5
To get along with your friends (even your best friend, who repeatedly asks me why I’m putting
up with you, until I answer, Oh, I have my reasons, with the same coy smile most often used to
defend your sexual honour, which results in a resounding slap on your back that reminds you
why you love me, even when I tell you later that all your friends act like 12-year-olds).
5 Your mother never says anything but Oh it’s excellent, thank you so much for dinner! but you
